WASHINGTON – The Senate flinched again yesterday on the potent issue of illegal immigration, refusing to consider legislation that would have put thousands of undocumented immigrant students on paths to citizenship.

By 52-44 – eight short of the 60-vote majority needed under Senate rules – senators effectively killed the DREAM Act after the Bush administration announced its opposition to it. The bill's defeat came four months after the Senate rejected more comprehensive immigration legislation that the White House supported.

Known officially as “the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act,” the bill would have allowed illegal immigrants' children who have grown up in the United States the opportunity to apply for citizenship if they graduate from high school and attend two years of college or serve in the military.

While far more limited than the bill that died in the Senate in late June, the measure nevertheless ignited the same divisions, with opponents denouncing it as amnesty that would pave the way to legalizing millions of illegal immigrants.

Tensions flared after Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., a presidential candidate who is calling for restrictive immigration policies, sought unsuccessfully to obtain the arrests of several illegal immigrant students whom the bill's chief sponsor, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., invited to Washington to help lobby for the legislation.

“America is a better nation than what we hear from the likes of that congressman,” Durbin said on the Senate floor before the vote. Tancredo later shot back in a news release that Durbin's bill was designed “to do one thing – benefit illegal aliens.”

Durbin said illegal immigrant children are caught in legal limbo after they enter the United States with their parents. Many, he said, grow up in this country, attend school and become part of the American culture but are unable to become legal contributing citizens because of their undocumented status.

“These are kids without a country,” he said.

As he argued on behalf of the bill, he stood beside an oversize photograph of Marie Gonzalez, 21, an undocumented student who came to the United States when she was 5 and is a political science major at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo.

Gonzalez, who was among several undocumented students watching the debate from the gallery, said she was scheduled to be deported June 30, just 18 semester hours short of her graduation. “It is a tragedy what is happening to these students,” she said after the vote at an impromptu news conference in Durbin's office.

A surprisingly large contingent of 12 Republicans supported the motion to proceed on the bill after Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, secured Durbin's consent for a proposed compromise aimed at softening conservatives' objections. It would have allowed immigrant children to stay in the country and secure student and work visas but would have required them to get behind other applicants in applying for permanent legal status.

Hutchison described the potential beneficiaries of the bill as young people who were “brought to this country not of their own doing.